Vacationers and business travelers alike are frequently interested in locating landmarks and sites of significance when visiting a city. Landmarks can include sites and locales such as historical sites, architectural structures, and other locations of significant interest and/or importance. Traditionally, a traveler would research a destination city/location to identify “must see” locations. This research and decision making was done manually and sometimes took hours upon hours to complete.
As mapping applications continue to evolve on the Internet, there is an ongoing demand to provide additional focused and targeted information to users. Conventionally, mapping applications have been used primarily to provide users with directions to and/or from a particular location. As well, these applications sometimes provide additional generic information about the particular destination location.
By way of example, when planning for a business trip or vacation, a user can use a mapping application to easily request driving directions from one location to another. Additionally, these mapping applications can be employed to provide other information about a destination location. Many applications can assist a user to research a destination location with regard to “must see” locations.
Mapping applications today can assist in identification of well known landmarks and other “points of interest” (POIs) such as hot-spots, restaurants, theaters, hotels, etc. A listing of POIs can assist a user to plan a trip by providing the user with options and ideas regarding a destination location. However, traditional mapping applications do not provide information to assist a user to rank and/or narrow down a list of landmarks and/or POIs.
For instance, if a user travels to a large city, e.g., New York City (NYC), a landmark and POI list could include a seemingly unmanageable number of historical sites, hot-spots, restaurants and hotels. However, these applications are not equipped to intelligently assist a visitor and/or traveler to select particular sites to visit based upon POIs. As well, applications today do not provide any guidance regarding the popularity of any one POI from a complete list of POIs or other rating factors. Rather, mapping programs historically generate a laundry list of sites and POIs thereafter leaving any research, ranking, selecting and/or sorting to the user to plan details of their stay. Therefore, a user is oftentimes forced to sift through a voluminous number of landmark sites and PIOs when planning a visit or vacation.